IT WAS AT PUSSY BEAU’S, where we find me in still another guise that I must pause a moment to explain.
Pussy had come running out the house that afternoon when I was working on the grounds, stringing up Japanese lanterns for a lawn party she was giving that night, to moan this time that the little Lithuanian who helped her maid Harriet out when they entertained had stood her up. “Do you have a white coat?” she asked. “Yes,” I fibbed, and hightailed it to town to buy a flannel jacket to wear with some blue surge pants I had. I guess I misunderstood what she meant. She was talking about a waiter’s linen jacket, not the white summer dress coat I got me. Anyhow, I was indistinguishable from the guests that night, and so was launched on a career a little beyond that of extra waiter. As I was dressing upstairs in my room I could hardly wait to get to the party. There was a rumor Cyril Ritchard would be there.
Everybody else was, looking very handsome in full summer fig under the colored lights I now took pleasure in having installed. The guests were 2 doz. strong, and they all seemed to arrive at once, so Harriet and I were kept pretty busy pouring champagne out there on the lawn. (It turned out Mrs. Beau had a whole extra couple doing the catering, but we were all needed.)
This was the first time I had ever handled champagne but under Harriet’s instruction I quickly learned how to wrap the bottle in a napkin and how to pry the cork off and how to pour without spilling. My only mishap was with Mrs. Springer, I was so startled to find myself serving her.
It was her who had promised to bring Cyril Ritchard but had arrived instead with a 1/2baked set designer in tow that nobody had ever heard of and who she promptly cast adrift. “I told Cyril if he played Captain Hook on television one more time I’d scream,” she was telling another woman, at one lick explaining the actor’s absence and making her seem even more familiar with him than at 1st suspected. Her husband, who they called C.B.S., was tied up in town with a television production of his own, and would be along later. Her yellow eyes in their thick black lashes reminded me of bees glutted with honey, but behind their lazy superiority you sensed the lust behind all snobbery, the drive, the social and physical appetite. She was lean and hard, with thin lips and a smile like a twist of lemon peel. The purr with which she spoke was that of a cat with claws ready for use at an instant’s notice. She wore a pink stole that was soft as cotton candy, intended no doubt to bathe in a rosy glow a neck and face of whose beauty pride and desire and no doubt pleasure (cultural affairs) had took their toll. At which Ambition, maidenly and then motherly, had also et like acid. This was the adulteress who had ordered her son to discard the chicken farmer’s daughter. But at the moment the farmer was studying her as a student of local tans. There are 2 kinds, those acquired lying in the sun and those acquired working in it. I had noticed that these women most obsessed with turning brown (there are some who literally dedicate their summers to it) did not seem to realize that whats called the law of diminishing returns operates here as well as everywhere in life; that theres a point beyond which more sun cracks and dries rather than beautifies. “Your beginning to get that cowchip look,” I wanted to warn her. I was disturbed by the note of compassion creeping in again. And of course there was that faint line where the brown ended and the white began, that was like a razor edge drawn across my vitals.
“Whoa!” she laughed, drawing her glass from under the cataract pouring down like a cascade.
“Sorry ma’am.”
“That’s perfectly all right,” Mrs. Springer said, not looking at who was embarrassed. I left her the napkin off the bottle to wipe herself with and beat it, hearing her friend remark, “Extra measure for the guest of honor.”
Standing behind the icebox in the kitchen I drunk my first champagne, gulping the dregs straight out the bottle as I watched the couple from the caterers and Harriet bustling about under the Japanese lanterns. So the arch enemy was not only here, the party was for her. Her birthday I found out later. Still wasn’t it fearless of me and not traitorous to be stalking the enemy right on their home ground? And why enemy when you finally got down to the brass tacks? Hadn’t I rightly insisted to Mare that what drove us Spoffords on was not our hatred of this society really so much as our wish and determination that in spite of her first rebuff our girl would finally one day make good in it? What were we scrimping and saving to educate her for to begin with if not that? Yes, that was my vow for her now in this environment where, in some way not yet clearly revealed, I might at this moment be running interference for her. Geneva would not only be asked again by some educated boy to meet his family. This time she would pass mustard. I promised myself more than that. I would run her interference by damn well passing mustard in that society myself.
That night I dropped forever the rustic ways by which I had been keeping these people rather priggishly at a distance, I suppose, and tuned myself even more finely than ever into their ways. I kept my ear twice as cocked for words and inflections, my eye twice as peeled for gestures, mannerisms and attitudes, tirelessly observing, rehearsing, copying.
Well during a breather after the first of the dinner service I stole around the high paling which bordered the Beauseigneur grounds on the other side from the Wilcoxes, where the Kidderminsters lived. The Kidderminsters were spending the summer in the Orient so the house was dark and nobody would see me there. I found a knothole rather close to the ground, and squatted down to peer through it at the guests, a short whiskey in hand. I found myself not four feet from a table at which were seated Lester Beauseigneur, Mrs. Springer, Pussy Wilcox and a eminent dentist named Haxby who had capped the teeth of several actors. I won’t mention them by name though I know. I can’t stand name dropping, as I once told Bea Lillie. Mrs. Springer was lamenting her failure to bring McGland along any more than she had Cyril Ritchard, to maybe read for them after dinner. “Gowan has gone up to Harvard to cut a new recording. Some of his later things,” she said. Evidently failing to have celebrities in tow was her fort. A sharp tap on my shoulder made me turn, revealing the tap to be from a nightstick held by a uniformed policeman.
I rose, recognizing the cop in charge of the evening’s parking, who had walked over to make a routine check on the Kidderminster premises. They had their name on the police list as vacant while they were in the Orient.
The glass in my hand give me the inspiration for my answer. “These parties,” I said. “Wouldn’t you say its a little early to be throwing them over the fence? It’s the shank of the evening.” I pretended to look around the lawn for others. This seemed to satisfy the cop. He even squatted down to peer through the knothole himself. “What’s that they’re eating?” he says, and I says, “Something Provencale.” That seemed to reassure him even more, and he presently moseyed back to the front road to watch the cars, swinging his stick. I went back to the kitchen to help pass seconds around.
At midnight I was leaning against a porch pillar having another breather with a cigar. The tray on which I had just passed a round of highballs was on a table near the kitchen door. The caterers and Harriet were cleaning up inside. Mrs. Beau was at the other end of the garden with a group who were singing discordantly under the stars. A stocky man in a Madras jacket strolled up to the porch. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”
“That could be. Your face seems familiar . . .”
“Now I remember. The Model T with the flowerbox behind. And the SCAT. I love your SCAT. Just the way I feel about the new cars myself. Tell me, what year is she?”
“’26. Tell me, what do you drive?”
“Apperson Jack Rabbit ’21. Remember the Jack Rabbit?”
“I do indeed.”
He turned around and beckoned another man over, much taller and thinner. “My name is Gromler. Hopwood here has a Stutz Bearcat,” he chatted. “You may have seen a picture of it in Life. I don’t believe I caught your name.”
“Spofford.”
“Yes. Hopwood and I were just saying how ridiculous it is we don’t have a gymkhana here when towns half this size put them on every year. How do you feel about that, Spofford?”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” I said, trying to make a mental photograph of the word in order to look it up later, though its meaning as a term for some kind of tournament or display was clear from the way the talk was going. Hopwood, a man with a red wisp of beard and a curved pipe, nodded agreement as Gromler went on to say, “There must be a good thirty of us around here with traps worth showing, and once these gymkhanas get established as annual events, they pour in from miles around to enter. Look, why don’t we go as a committee of three to the country club and ask for the field some Saturday? Hopwood’s game I’m sure. How about you, Spofford?”
“I’m with you 100%.”
“Let’s drink on it. Where’s that jackanapes who’s suppose to be serving?”
Thus in five minutes I had changed from a man who had just kept his Ford, like the woman in Proust who kept her hats, to an old car buff—very nearly the innermost circle in Woodsmoke as far as outward status symbols was concerned. Beyond us lay only that small, final band of snobs who grind their own coffee and suck on pellets of bitter licorice.
Seeing Mrs. Beau in the distance shooting frowns of investigation around I excused myself and ducked into the kitchen. Under Harriet’s watchful eye I prepared a fresh tray of highballs and brandies which I managed to pass among the crowd without being recognized by either of my fellow car buffs, who were in any case at a table making a list of other car buffs and the make and year they drove. My rounds again made, I put the tray down and mingled some more. I was particularly fascinated by an amusing little group who were being malicious about friends not present, on whose fringe I hovered nursing a leftover whiskey and soda. A man was describing a young woman they knew as “an aging Lolita.” That was exactly the sort of thing I would like to do, and listened closely in order to get the hang of it. The problem was to refine into more sophisticated, or brittle, talk the humor that in some small degree at least I possessed. The glances of the speakers making the quips began to include me (proof again of my point that nobody ever looks at a waiter when he’s serving them). From there I concentrated on the next stage, making some contribution to the conversation myself. This made me both keyed up and a little apprehensive. The talk presently turned to the perenial subject of college choices and chances. A young man was mentioned that I happened to know. “Jimmy’s interested in comparative religion,” a woman said, “and his mother was wondering if he might get into Yale Divinity School.”
“He hasn’t got a prayer,” I cracked, and took a swig.
They all roared. The woman said she would dine out on that. I took another generous slug of my highball, at the same time melting a little closer into the group so as to keep out of sight of Mrs. Beau. The conversation turned to another youth who wanted to write, had, in fact, published a novel about this very section of the country. “It’s a good external picture of exurbia as such,” a man said, “but there isn’t a single character in it who’s three dimensional.”
“Ever meet anybody around here who is?” I asked.
Now they began to ask who I was, whispering among each other in subdued hums when I left, as leave I prudently did when I seen Mrs. Beau on the prowl looking for the help. They repeated what I had said to fresh arrivals, as I could make out as I stood behind a porch pillar near the group. Harriet stuck her head out the kitchen door to ask was I having a good time; if not I might pitch in with the cleaning up. I was about to go in when over the heads of the crowd I caught sight of Mrs. Beau again, this time beckoning me definitely down. She came toward the porch, pulling along with her none other than Mrs. Springer.
I was waiting for them at the front of the porch steps when they arrived, my heart in my throat.
“Frank, I’ve been telling Mrs. Springer you’re the man in town who knows everything there is to know about roses. Mr. Spofford, Mrs. Springer . . . Mrs. Springer has this fabulous rose garden and nobody to help her with it. I know you’re busy and I shouldn’t have mentioned it, but once I had she insisted on meeting you.” Mrs. Beau run on in this vain for a few minutes, then excused herself to make another of her sallies among the guests.
Mrs. Springer looked slightly less fresh than when first seen, and was rather badly treated just there by the colored shadows thrown by the paper lanterns, which prove that soft lights are not automatically flattering if they hit you wrong. She looked like a member of a darker though not necessarily more primitive race. I figured she probably looked better lying in bright sunlight coated with one or another of the exotic variations of Crisco women use preparatory to broiling theirself in summer.
“Can I get you a drink?” I says, seeing her roll an empty glass between her palms.
“No thank you. I’m fine.”
“How is Tad?”
“Oh fine. You know my son?”
While deciding whether to seethe or snort I tried to find in her face some clue as to whether she was playing dumb or had really not tumbled to my name. My face I could write off as probably rendered as unrecognizable by the lights as her own. Could she so lightly have sluffed from the Springer memory the incident that still rankled in the bosom of the Spofford? I decided she was insincere, and to draw on my own resources for orneriness. She give me plenty of opening by transferring her attention from the tumbler she was still rolling between her hands to me and saying, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” I struck the stance in which she would of seen me at Harry Pycraft’s motel, if she looked; I turned my profile and hooked a thumb into my pants pockets while gazing off into the distance, or what there is left of it in Conn. I accompanied this with a vague mumble about the Dew Drop Inn. Then I give her memory another malicious jog.
“I heard Gowan McGland was coming to read. I’m disappointed he didn’t show up.”
“You like his work?”
“I admire his artistic—well is gall the word? I mean he does get away with murder.”
“Well he takes chances. Any genius must, don’t you think?”
“Of course.”
She knew by now which was which in the cat and mouse now in full swing, and smiled nervously. She said, “Would you like to meet him? He’s moved into our guest house for the summer you know, to get some writing done. He’s always leaving his desk to wander about the grounds. He loves flowers, and anybody working out there would be bound to get to know Gowan.”
“And to know him is to love him.”
“We have this old Bradshaw place, you probably know it and all those roses old Mrs. Bradshaw nursed along for so many years. I can’t seem to keep anybody, and it’s tragic to see it go to rack and ruin.” She dropped the sparring manner—or her end of it—and laid a weightless hand on my forearm. “A day a week? Please?”
“There’s only seven in a week, and God himself needed one to rest on.”
“Mrs. Beauseigneur says you’ve got the greenest thumb in Woodsmoke. Never mind me. Think of the roses. Or old Mrs. Bradshaw. My husband is no use.” This was far from the first time I had heard that cry around here. Spofford grew tense as, across a vast, cold tundra of his mind he saw flash off and on in red neon letters the word “nymphomaniac”.
“What about your son?” I said. “How does he spend his days?”
“Trotting around the roads in shorts and a sweatshirt. He’s going out for track next year. He’s taken a vow to do the four-minute mile. I mean we’re all glad for these obsessions, but where do they come from?”
“Maybe he’s running away from something.”
Mrs. Springer raised her hand so suddenly I thought she was going to paste me one. After removing it from my arm, though, she laid it flat across my chest, as though she was going to shove me backward onto the porch steps. Nothing of the kind. Instead a look almost reverent in its appreciation come into her face as she said, “I wish I’d said that. May I steal it?”
“Help yourself.” I shifted my weight a little and looked down, pinching my nose. “Don’t you have another boy? What about him?”
“Married and living in Waltham. And,” Mrs. Springer added, slightly increasing the pressure of her palm against my chest, “about to have his first baby.” Now she removed her hand and hung her head like a debutante. “I’m about to become a grandmother.”
I nodded. “Well maybe I can come Tuesday and at least have a look at your roses. Maybe give you some advice.”
That I didn’t need to commit myself any more definitely to these women than that was I guess part of my snowballing what-do-you-call-it. Vogue.